Shadowed Ground (14 page)

Her lips were light and soft against his. She barely touched her lips to his before doing it again. He breathed a little faster. He could feel her heartbeat through the thin cotton between them. It was racing. He struggled to hold his still. Her lips brushed his again. “Is this ok?” she whispered. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

He made a sound then, deep in his throat. Eyes closed, he was drowning in her scent, in the softness of her skin, in her slight weight on top of him. His hands covered her own and slid up her forearms, holding her lightly there. “Chloe,” he murmured, her name impossibly precious to him.

Her hands, now, traveling across his throat, down his neck. Her lips met the side of his neck, soft, her breath warm against him. He relaxed into the pillows under her.

Her fingers found his and knit them together. She leaned her head against his heart. She put her hand, palm down, against the flat of his bare stomach. “When I saw you, lying on the floor and covered with blood,” she choked, unable to finish.

He could no longer lay still. He reached down and tilted her face up. “Chloe. I felt that way from the first second I saw you. When I saw you with that boy, in Atlanta, even before the party, I wanted to rip you from his hands.” He ran his thumb across her bottom lip. “From the first moment I saw you, I only ever wanted to keep you safe.” He pulled her up so that her face was level with his. “Not because it’s my job, but because it’s you.” He ran his fingers through her hair, watching as it fell to frame them.

She closed her eyes this time, and laid her head in the crook of his neck. “Safe,” she murmured. Her hand pressed itself over his heart.

He curled his good arm around her protectively. “It’s enough,” he murmured as he drifted off to sleep.

Chapter Fifteen: Buried

She watched Eliot as he lay, nearly motionless, on top of the ugly purple bedspread. His eyelids flickered every now and then, the skin taut and shot with faint blue veins, like cracks in old paper that might break at any moment. The flickering movement and the way his chest rose and fell steadily were the only two things that let her know he was still alive. The medication had done its job; Eliot was as insensate to pain as he was the rest of the world.

Too keyed up to settle and too worried to move beyond a direct line of sight, Chloe contented herself with scrubbing her hands as minutely as possible in the room’s only sink. Pain radiated across her shoulders and down her back, both from her still-tender scars and the tension she’d been carrying since Eliot first burst into her dressing room, looking like murder itself. She could see his reflection in the mirror over the sink, and while she scrubbed her hands raw, she felt a tightness in her chest very similar to the one she’d had when he pushed against her in the break room.

He could have died, and where would that have left her? For the first time she had a sense of his fragility; he had always seemed so tough. Her every encounter with Eliot so far had underscored his almost preternatural abilities as a fighter and protector. But in that little room where he’d been so badly injured, she’d managed to fight one of them herself. She remembered its terrible, sibilant hissing speech and mocking words; the stench of metallic fire felt soaked into her bones. And yet. She had done something to it, something to weaken or at least surprise it. If she hadn’t, she had no doubt both she and her Guardian would be dead or captured.

Kazek, she remembered. The Emperor of Fire wanted her alive now, and they knew her land sense was waking. I’m not sure I didn’t like it better when they just wanted me dead, she reflected grimly, noticing her fingernails were pink and raw from scrubbing. She dried them absently on the brand-new jeans she’d managed to salvage.

Eliot didn’t stir as she paced the room. There was so much to digest: the attack, the way she had to fight to keep herself from reacting to the Abandoned. Most frightening of all, she didn’t know what kind of reaction had been building. She had reacted as if the poison inside her recognized them, and wanted to get out, however it could. The thought was so grim she wrapped her arms around her middle, sick and desperately needing reassurance from Eliot. From anyone.

Surely that was crazy thinking. Surely they hadn’t literally poisoned her, leaving trace amounts of their darkness inside. And yet. She remembered the one that had come for her alone, remembered the dark emotions it almost pulled from her, and wondered how she knew to resist. It had been instinctive, as if she had known that opposite emotions would weaken the thing.

How could she know that? Was it even true? She edged against the bed and a sleeping Eliot. How she wished she could ask.

Gingerly, Chloe arranged herself next to her sleeping Guardian. There was only one source she could turn to now, until he woke up. And even when he did, there was no guarantee he’d know more than she did. With shaking hands she pulled her aunt’s diary from the olive green knapsack and untied the ribbon. While she waited for him to heal, she might as well learn all she could, no matter how little she wanted to.

Capital Citadel

Annwyn

I have forgotten the season. The days blend together now; I think it might be fall, but I’m not certain. Annwyn is a lone island in a sea of chaos; besieged on all borders by the Fire Priests and their armies of possessed people, the weather never changes. Crops wither so that we rely on stored and emergency rations.

Sometimes I want a ripe apple so badly I think I might kill for it. I, who have grown up surrounded by orchards, walk among them now and watch as the dead fruit crumbles in my hand.

If only Father would let me help. He is frequently bedridden with the effort of keeping up the wards; the land demands too much of him. Soon, the effort of keeping them out will kill him and bring our wards crashing down. We’ll all die, then, and I grow so frustrated with his many refusals that I think of binding myself in secret.

But he insists that he will not tie his daughter to a dying land.

It is one of the many things we do not talk about, as refugees choke the border towns and our own people starve. Our time here is limited, and every day the ground I walk is shadowed with death. Every day we live in fear only makes them stronger, our darkest emotions a feast for them.

I fear I will go to my grave never knowing where they came from, these enemies of ours who mimic human form and feed on the worst inside us.

But the important thing is that we fight them. Father swears the Magisters have a solution, and that when it is time, they will need me in the new land. In this strange place where we are to make our home, he says they will need the binding as never before. I can keep not only our own people safe, but guard this new land from the threat that has consumed ours. Everyone knows the binding is dangerous, even deadly, under normal circumstances. The three ritual cuts, the blood loss, three days of being buried alive… I wouldn’t be the first to not survive it.

But in the new land, I must try. We don’t know if it will work, or if the abilities I have here will work in the new place. Magister Thorne has sampled the soil, and tested it against Father’s blood. He swears there is a good chance of it. So what choice do I have, really? I watch as my father dies, as our young ones grow hard with terror. They are the real reason I will do this, so that my brother’s child will have a chance at a new life, and that Taran’s son, her Eliot, will grow up in a word where he isn’t afraid to breathe.

-Callista

Chloe slammed the diary shut. Her brain literally could not process all the information. She stared at an almost motionless Eliot, strongly tempted to shake him awake and demand answers. She wanted her mother in front of her, too, so she could throw the diary in her face and call for a reckoning of every lie she’d ever been told.

Phrases fired across her brain like shooting stars in a meteor shower: Armies of possessed people; dead fruit crumbling; wards crashing down; a world shadowed with death. And through it all, like a hopelessly tangled ribbon, wove the slowly building knowledge of the ritual binding to the land.

A ritual they all wanted, needed, her to undergo. A ritual that could kill her, and sounded worse than unpleasant under the best of circumstances. Ritual cuts, with blood loss? She wanted to shriek at Eliot. And what the hell did Callista mean, buried in the earth for three days? How could anyone survive that?

And yet they did. Callista’s own father had, and Callista herself, so it was at least possible. But would she? Did she even want to? Chloe nervously thumbed the closed diary and studied her Guardian again. He had known about the ritual, she was sure of it, and yet had withheld the gory details. So had her own parents, for that matter.

She jumped to her feet and started pacing. Neither her mother nor Eliot had answers for her right now. She would have to figure this out for herself. At least, she thought, pausing for a moment to brush sweaty dark hair back from Eliot’s face, she knew who Taran was. Remembering his earlier words about the woman she now knew to be his mother, Chloe felt her heart soften slightly. Ruthless and loving, he’d called her. His own mother, Guardian to the woman who’d held the portal shut against armies of fire. What had happened to her, in the end? Had she made the crossing?

Ruthless and deeply loving, like her son, Chloe mused. She watched his chest rise and fall slowly, so slowly, and scanned his bloody bandages. He’d almost died for her, and would again in a heartbeat. She knew this more certainly than she knew anything else right now. Eliot kept telling her the decision to bind herself to the land was hers to make, but coupled with the knowledge that she was the last person who could, it didn’t leave her much of a choice.

But she was already bound to Eliot. Come with me, he had told her. Just come and see a place so beautiful she would want to pick stars from the air. It was not just a place that meant life or death, or the safety of worlds. It was his home. As he shifted a bit in his deeply drugged sleep, she decided that for now, that was enough.

Thank You For Reading

Stay tuned for the sequel to
Shadowed Ground
, the third installment in the
Chronicles of Nowhere
series:
The Forsaken Fire
!

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Acknowledgements:

Thanks to everyone at Curiosity Quills for their encouragement, assistance, and support. A very special thanks to Lisa Gus. Without her this project might never have seen the light of day.

Thanks to Row80 for being the greatest writer’s group ever: you give me encouragement, advice, music, laughter, and fellowship. Stacey Wallace Benefiel, Kait Nolan, Lauralynn Elliot, Claudia LaFeve, Kate Copeseeley, and Jeff Brian kept me laughing, pulled Twitter sprints, and generally kept me from getting sucked into distractions while I worked on Chronicles. Thanks also to the amazing staff of the IBC, who kept me from taking myself too seriously, or not seriously enough. This story had its genesis at the DC ’09 and ’10 writer’s workshops. Thanks to Alina Blanco, Gigi Ganesh, and Mandy Petriewski. To Standard Deluxe for being an oasis of fellowship and creativity in somewhat dark times, and for being the kickin’est music venue this side of the Mississippi.

To Max and Grace, who no longer think it strange to have a mother who plays make-believe for a living. Mom, thanks for all your support. Lastly, to Daniel, who keeps me in playlists, coffee, and chocolate; who keeps our home from turning into a house; who is still, after forever and no time at all, my best friend in the world.